This series is part of a project that investigates poetry translation as a correspondence between author and translator. For this translation, I took Marion Poschmann’s original poems and translated them in two ways: first by attempting to faithfully retain as much of the original content from the German version as possible; and then by writing new poems that directly responded to each of her texts. In this way, non-German-speaking readers gain insight into the German text through these two distinct vantage points. There is also a third sort of “translation” going on here: a visual representation of the translation act itself. Using various design elements, I attempted to show the movement and relationship between all three versions of each text, depicting a sense of call and response, as well as enforcing the notion of creative translation as an evolving form of interpretation.

Sharmila Cohen lives in Berlin, where she initially moved on a Fulbright Scholarship to investigate poetry in translation and now works as a freelance writer, translator, and editor. She is a co-founding editor of the translation press Telephone Books. Her work can be found in Harper’s Magazine, Circumference, and Epiphany, among other places.

German poet Marion Poschmann was asked to be this year’s lyrikline curator, tasked with selecting four German speaking poets to be recorded for the website in 2017. She will introduce her selections at an event at Haus für Poesie in Berlin on November 16, 2017.